Some good news and some bad news at the same time

Jan 12, 2011

Well, the good news is that we're back on the road with Helloween. And Jörg Michael is back in his drum chair after his brush with death. The bad news is that Timo Kotipelto caught some sort of bacterial infection. We suspect it was something from the backstage food in December, but we don't know. Two of the other people on the tour had the same thing: a very bad dysentery-like stomach infection with vomiting and diarrhea, dehydration, also eventually had to go to hospital, etc.

Timo's infection is stubborn and in addition to ruining his Christmas break, it has dried out his vocal cords. In his own words, he can't sing a note at the moment. We are currently in France and so far we had to cancel playing in Paris and Lyon.

We are of course very sorry about this, and nobody is more heartbroken or frustrated than Timo himself. Apart from heeding the advice from doctors we are in touch with, the only thing we can do at the moment is to hope Timo gets better. We will ride the 1000 km to Bilbao tonight and hopefully we will all get some sleep on the nice smooth French motorways.

Here is a short video about the Paris cancellation and some words from Jörg. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBqq3o0_fhc

The cluster we are on at Dreamhost has lately had a few issues
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As of Fri Mar 9 05:00:01 2012 GMT, server was up 172 days, 18:56. Load average last minute was 1.42, last five minutes 2.05, last fifteen minutes 2.22.
Load averages over 20 will make everything here very sluggish.